Mamá to Madre? ‘Roma’ Subtitles in Spain Anger Alfonso Cuarón

If you complain to Netflix, the streaming big listens. At least it does in the event you’re Alfonso Cuarón, the Golden Globe-winning director of “Roma.”

In the movie, set in Mexico City in the 1970s, the actors communicate Mexican Spanish and the indigenous Mixtec language. For that Spanish, Netflix added subtitles in Castilian, Spain’s principal dialect, for the discharge in that nation. On Wednesday, Netflix eliminated these Castilian subtitles after Cuarón instructed El País, a Spanish newspaper, that they had been “parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards themselves.”

Even generally understood phrases like “mamá,” for mom, had been translated (in that case to “madre”) as had been the phrases for “get angry” and “you.”

“Gansito,” the identify of a Mexican chocolate snack, was maybe extra unintentionally modified to “ganchitos,” a cheese puff.

Cuarón would not comment for this article, but Bebe Lerner, his representative, said in a telephone interview that Cuarón told Netflix to change the subtitles as soon as he learned of them after an event in New York on Tuesday night.

The only form of subtitles now available for the Spanish dialogue in Spain are closed captions — the form that benefits those who are hard of hearing or deaf. These feature the Mexican-Spanish dialogue in its original form. (Those closed captions have been available since the film was released there.)

Netflix would not answer questions about its use of Castilian for “Roma” or other films and TV shows it buys from Latin America.

The problem was first spotted in December by Jordi Soler, a Mexican author who lives in Barcelona. He tweeted that the subtitles were “paternalistic, offensive and deeply provincial” after seeing a subtitled “Roma” in a Barcelona cinema.

There were two problems with the subtitles, he said. The first was the assumption Spanish people could not understand simple words in a different dialect.

“It’s like if you have an American film showing in the U.K. and the character says he’s going to the washroom, but the subtitles say he’s going to the loo,” Soler said in a telephone interview. “It’s ridiculous. They’re treating the people of Spain like they’re idiots.”

But he said the bigger problem was that the subtitles played into the history of Spanish colonialism.

“In Latin America we have an extreme sensitivity with everything Spain does,” Soler said, “and in Spain they treat Latin American people like they’re still a colony.” Netflix’s choice to change Mexican words felt just like that, he added.

Not everyone agrees. “It is possible the controversy has been magnified beyond what is reasonable,” Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, a member of the governing board of the Royal Spanish Academy, the guardian of language in Spain, said in an email. He added that he was not offended when he saw “Roma” in a cinema, he was simply distracted because the words onscreen didn’t match what he heard.

“There is no ‘standard Spanish,’” he said, and there are no major differences between dialects.

“Films in the Spanish language — whatever their country of origin — do not need to be ‘translated,’” he said. “A Spaniard can see a film shot in Argentina, Colombia or Mexico without special difficulties. And the other way round.”

Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in Spanish and Linguistics at Cambridge University, who has Greek and British citizenship, said Netflix’s refusal to use the Mexican-Spanish in “Roma” was outrageous. The variety of dialects in any language should be celebrated, she said, not suppressed.

“Netflix is essentially sending a message that the way we speak is not better than the way we write, and that’s a very old-fashioned idea,” she said.

She added: “How many times will this keep happening around the world? People who speak minority, nonstandard languages cannot help but feeling that their native language is not good enough.”